Succinct Functional Encryption and Applications: Reusable Garbled Circuits and Beyond.

TL;DR: The main result is a functional encryption scheme for any general function f of depth d, with succinct ciphertexts whose size grows with the depth d rather than the size of the circuit for f .

Abstract: Functional encryption is a powerful primitive: given an encryption Enc(x) of a value x and a secret key skf corresponding to a circuit f , it enables efficient computation of f(x) without revealing any additional information about x. Constructing functional encryption schemes with succinct ciphertexts that guarantee security for even a single secret key (for a general function f ) is an important open problem with far reaching applications, which this paper addresses. Our main result is a functional encryption scheme for any general function f of depth d, with succinct ciphertexts whose size grows with the depth d rather than the size of the circuit for f . We prove the security of our construction based on the intractability of the learning with error (LWE) problem. More generally, we show how to construct a functional encryption scheme from any public-index predicate encryption scheme and fully homomorphic encryption scheme. Previously, the only known constructions of functional encryption were either for specific inner product predicates, or for a weak form of functional encryption where the ciphertext size grows with the size of the circuit for f . We demonstrate the power of this result, by using it to construct a reusable circuit garbling scheme with input and circuit privacy: an open problem that was studied extensively by the cryptographic community during the past 30 years since Yao’s introduction of a one-time circuit garbling method in the mid 80’s. Our scheme also leads to a new paradigm for general function obfuscation which we call token-based obfuscation. Furthermore, we show applications of our scheme to homomorphic encryption for Turing machines where the evaluation runs in input-specific time rather than worst case time, and to publicly verifiable and secret delegation.